Thought I would share this news article with you. It caught my eye because Melody has a “Joy of Cooking” cookbook.
And changes in “Joy of Cooking” have been going on for a while. Increases in overall calories per recipe have been gradual, but portion sizes tended to jump, first during the ’40s, again during the ’60s, and with the largest jump in the 2006 edition.
The first significant signs of restaurant portion inflation didn’t show up until the late ’70s, says Wansink.
Lisa Young, an adjunct nutrition professor at New York University, had similar findings in a 2002 study that compared the book’s brownie recipe from the ’60s and ’70s editions to the recipe from the 1997 edition.
“Same recipe. Same pan. But in the ’60s and ’70s it yielded 30 brownies,” she says. “In the 1997 edition it yielded 15.”
She also was able to trace the trend to other recipe sources. For example, a popular chocolate chip cookie recipe that decades before produced 100 cookies, made only 60 during the ’80s, though no ingredients had changed.